You met Lance Howarth, the CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation (this means he heads up our charitable giving), when he joined us earlier in the autumn. Today Lance has some news for you – and a very silly hat.

Lance says:

Ho Ho Ho!

He’s leaving presents under the tree, not stealing them. Honest.

Here at Pi Towers we are getting into the festive spirit, and we’ve been thinking how best to pay back the goodwill our community has shown us over the last year. So, in support of “Hour of Code” as part of Computer Science Education week, we got together with our friends from Google and we are going to give away Pis for Christmas. That’s right: we’re giving away up to 2000 Google Raspberry Pis to anyone under the age of 18 in the United Kingdom. To qualify for a free Pi you need to do one of two things. Either:

Design a “My Pi Project” poster and send it to us here at Pi Towers, and we’ll send you your own Raspberry Pi.

How do I take part?

You can get more information on Hour of Code week from our friends at Code.org. They have lots of great ideas of what you can do for the Hour Of Code. If you are a member of Code Club, how about getting your class to have a go at their festive project Christmas Capers? To qualify for your Google Pi, just ask your teacher to register here. At the end of next week we’ll take the first thousand Raspberry Pis and start shipping them out on a first come, first served basis, so the Pis should be waiting for you when you come back to school in January.

Not everyone is going to get the opportunity participate in the Hour of Code week, but don’t worry, you can still get a free Google Pi. All you need to do is design a poster showing us what you think would be a cool Raspberry Pi project. This might be something to do with your pet, like an automatic cat flap or feeder; something to do with photography, like looking at the thermal image of your house; or something festive like controlling the Christmas lights so they flash along to music. If fact, anything will do, we are just looking to see how imaginative you can be and to learn what you think would be a cool project. Once you have designed your poster you need to get your parent to print this form out, fill it in, and then send it with your poster to us by post at:

Your poster needs to be with us by the 8th of January, so you’ll have plenty of time to get this done over the Christmas break. So get thinking!

Please note that we cannot accept entries that do not have parent/guardian contact details and signature.

Who ate all the Pis? Santa, of course!

A couple of notes: this promotion is only open to schools and kids in the UK (this requirement is placed on us by our partners at Google UK). You’ll receive Google Pi kits, which include a cased Model B Raspberry Pi, an SD card, a power supply, a copy of The MagPi, some projects recipe cards and a Getting Started guide. If you are a teacher and you send us a successful application, we will be getting in touch later in 2014 to talk about what you’re doing with the Raspberry Pis.

Well I think the idea is that kids don’t have money to buy one of their own, where as an “old fart” should. Not to mention that their goal has been and always will be about education for kids, not the hobbyists.

Such a shame it is not open to the scouting organisation. I run a cub pack (age 8 to 10, boys and girls) with about 20 members who would cry out for a computing related badge built around evenings spent coding and playing with a Raspberry Pi. If you do consider opening it up to this pool of interested individuals please do let me know.

Bravo, especially for linking the Hour of Code! Too bad it’s for UK kids only – my students want the address for Pi Towers so they can mail themselves there! :D

BTW, Google Maps shows “Pi Towers” as being at the 1st Histon Scouts, 1 Park Drive, Impington, Cambridge ;) It also suggests the Foundation is at either the University of Cambridge Computer Lab, the permanently-closed Center for Computing History (relocated, but no address), the Cambridge Judge Business School, or the Institute of Astronomy (that explains soooo much – we all suspected you were either aliens or space cadets! :lol: )

Now, off to shame Google here in the U.S. to match their UK office’s largess!

It’s not teachers as such, anyone responsible for learning. We want to see the Pis to be actively and regularly used by young people – and to get some feedback on what they are doing – so if you’ve done the Hour of Code with kids in your school, drop us a line.

As I fail all prerequisites (I’m not in the UK, I’m over 18 [i]and[/i] my last day at school is a considerable time ago ;) ) I can only say: well done Google (and the Foundation) and best of luck to all participants! :D

Thanks! Told the kids about it and we are doing it tomorrow, really looking forward to it. I’ve just taken up the post as ICT Coordinator at a state school in inner London. We haven’t got any of these pis yet but hopefully some free ones might help us get to grips with them…We’ll see!

What a great opportunity! (We are in the U.S. so we can’t qualify) but, I’ll just say yhat my 11 year old is so into working on his raspberry pi that he put together this past summer. He has taken a serious interest in programming and is learning both JavaScript and Python.

Kudos to you all for making this available to many more kids! I’ll be looking forward to someone in the U.S offering a neat deal like this!

I totally want to get a pi and replace the onboard computer on my car and add bluetooth. I’d like to use the existing display and GPS, but figuring out how to interface the touchscreen display and the GPS module to this pi seems really intimidating!

Not that I need a free one to do it. The education I’d need to make the project work is worth a hundred times the cost of a pi.

I’ve added an entry for my level 1 class, however we are a college not a school, so hoping that you will allow that. Colleges are education as well in the UK and have a high number of qualifying students, shame to rule them out really.

I home educate my kids (well, son is flexi-schooled) His school were not interested (AAAGGGHHHHH) so we did the hour of code ourselves last night. We are starting the 8 hours next week once my printer arrives. I have sent you his certificate and I put ‘free school’ as a school as there is no home education option. Hope thats OK

I’m in a very similar situation to Emma Salmon, so I’m hoping you’ll show us the same generosity! We’ve just done the Hour of Code this pm, and are looking forward to continuing the course on Friday, I’ve entered us as a ‘free school’ too. I’ll look to share the Pi with other home-educated kids with whom we do regular science and computing sessions. With thanks and best wishes, Pippa

I have made an application based on my students 3hours of coding they will do for their controlled assessment. But further to this, I have just looked at the Christmas capers hour of code and it looks great. I will be running it this week and next with various groups including year 7’s, 8’s and 9’s. They will love it! So can this please be added to our application too??? Might even do some posters too… Very excited!

26 of my students have just completed an hour of code. They have been doing the “Is Eliza Human?” Python activity on grok learning .com website. Is that all they have to do to the Pis?
Secondly, Does the Pi stay with school or do the students own it?
When the students registered for the activity , they were not asked to enter their school’s name. How does Google link teachers to students and schools so that my students can collect their Pis.

You (the teacher) need to fill out the registration form here to apply. We prefer the Pi to be given by the teachers to the students, so they can use them at home as well as at school – we firmly believe it’s the most effective way to learn with one; but that decision is down to the teacher.

Our our children have completed the Hour of code and had great fun. Its great that they are carrying on when they get home.
Really appreciate the opportunity to get some Raspberry pis in the school. Look forward to learning about them

Our 20 level 3 students have been doing a number of events this week for Hour of Code (Pascal, JavaScript, Actionscript, Python). I have registered using the link above but no reply. Is this normal? Plus do you need registers for students or any other details?

Hi a few members of my STEM Club have completed an hour of coding for the first time. I have just set up a Coding Club where they can begin to write their own games. 20 Pi’s would be a marvelous gift as some kids are FSM and cannot afford the kits. How do we verify our hour of code? All the best, Happy Christmas! Claire (STEM and Science Teacher)

great to link to HoC event. Here on my school (High School classes), we study on the Pi on a project based lesson. Too pity it is only for GB. Here in Greece we organized an HoC activity (plugged-unplugged) that you can watch here:

When does this competition end?
I am involved in launching an unmanned airborne raspberry pi quad helicopter club with a local High school. We are kicking off the project in January. There are 4 STEM ambassadors, 15 high school students and the Computing and DT teachers involved. We have successfully secured funding from local businesses and the IoP to buy a 3D printer, scanner and uav parts. However we can afford to provide a raspberry pi to each of the 15 students involved. It would have been fantastic to have done this. Will there be a repeat of the competition? Or can we use our first 1 hour coding session on 17 January 2014? The session will continue to run weekly on the Friday with the students having an additional one hour slot on the Wednesday to work on the project.
Thanks
Adam

That’s great thanks. I emailed the poster in last night. I got an auto reply from Clive which said he would be deleting his emails and I needed to resend the email after midday on the 6th?
I assume that doesn’t apply to the competition emails?
Cheers

I have a couple of pi’s at school one I would like to make into a wall display connected to a tv in my room. The competition says recipe cards do these have tasks kids can do at home then bring in and demonstrate? Also if we don’t win any and I have to fundraise can we download the cards?

Sent it! I’ve come up with an idea which I really like (A Dropbox Photo frame in a mirror, which has a mirror film on in), which I really can’t wait to build if I manage to get one! (hope I’m not too late!) :D

Possibly (we’ve been overwhelmed with entries, and Clive and Lance are just meeting to discuss how to make as many people happy as we can – we’ve had a simply enormous number of schools apply). Watch this space!

My son’s school (St Bartholemews, Westhoughton) registered for this on Tuesday Jan 7th but has not heard back. He was really excited about this over the school hols and couldn’t wait to get back to school to tell his teacher about it. Now he’s very upset because he thinks the wrong email address has been given! Hope someone can let him know if the entry has been accepted, thanks.

I am a volunteer on the board of a not-for-profit community library based in Manchester. As a new venue, we’re bring CoderDojo and CodeClub to our library.

We did a coding taster session on Tuesday to assess interest and were packed out. We also ran our first CodeClub today. Given that we’ve had our coding sessions this week and it appears we’re too late for this particular chance, could you help with two questions:

1. Would we qualify as a community library (soon to finish our charity registration)? We are a registered public CodeClub venue.

2. Any idea when/where the next such chance might be? Not necessarily from yourselves, just wondering if you had partners that it may be useful for us to contact.